Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [59]
For a moment I thought he sensed what was going through my mind. He was alert like some nocturnal animal, his nostrils flaring wider and wider. I pretended to not give a shit about him, stabbed some meat on the metal plate. Besides, he couldn’t actually care less about what I was eating, or how.
It was calm in the ward that evening. I ate alone, sat at one of the tables in the corner next to the dormitory. The doors were long locked. The huge, curtainless window looking onto the courtyard with its pile of snow was nothing but a black wall now. They quickly counted us. The sixty-watt bulb bathed its surroundings in yellow. Beneath its light, the faces of the men sitting at the tables looked more anemic than ever. It wasn’t long before the cigarette smoke made it almost impossible to see five feet in front of you. I caught a whiff of another familiar scent there in that smoke. A joint. It was coming from one of the tables by the window. Three men were sitting there sucking it in. They were always together, those three, in the courtyard, in the ward, evenings at the ward coffeehouse. I’d never spoken with them, not once. Sinan, the master, they’d never messed with those guys either. The tall one was shaped like a padlock; huge head, flat body, and virtually no neck. White skin, a little oily. He’d become the leader of the pack, even though he was new to the ward. He always wore a large, checkered dress shirt and a vest. The middle one had small, dark eyes that were pinched together, giving him these broad, open temples. The third one, the tiniest of them, had white skin and gray-blue eyes. I’d heard the big one grew up in Vefa. The other two were from Anatolia.
“In Diyarbakır, they water this stuff with chicken blood to make it sweeter,” said the middle one.
It was like each of them was talking to himself. Once the joint had made several rounds, they drank a few cups of tea, which was like tar by then, having steeped in the samovar for hours. It’d gotten pretty crowded around the tables. Like we were all curious to see what would happen next.
Sinan seemed almost oblivious to what was going on as he approached me. He was trying to hide his anxiety, as usual. But then he never was one to get mixed up in crowds. Especially during the day, he never ever walked about. He was in a rush, looking for something to busy himself with. He sat down on his bed, two bunks down from mine, and started writing something in half cursive, half printed letters, and unconsciously flipping through old letters. Probably from that bitch Funda. God only knows. As if that cunt’s really yearning for her lover’s return, like she claims in her letters. You’ve nailed her right between the legs the moment she gets a whiff of the dough, there’s not a fool who doesn’t know that much. At times like this, I wished he’d talk to me instead of taking refuge in Funda’s bullshit letters. But just the opposite, he grew even more distant. For a moment I thought of Funda riding him. The smell of her cheap perfume, her cheap panties, cheap lace; the chalky taste of cocaine leaving